In its current incarnation, Javascript prototype inheritance has some shortcomings. In particular, prototypes do not inherit their parent's constructor and methods in child prototypes can not dynamically access an inherited method they override.

After
Hannes'
and
Jürg's
suggestions for improvements to Dean Edwards'
Base Class
approach to Javascript inheritance, I made an attempt to solve the problem by focusing more intensely on fixing Javascript's prototype inheritance than adding class sugar around it.

I must admit that when I started reading the 5th edition, I quickly started to look forward to the 6th edition, although the 5th edition is well worth getting for anybody that works with Javascript.

The 5th edition seems to do some selective catching up and shies away even from Javascript 1.6 additions that look certain to be part of ECMA-262 version 4. Apparently, David Flanagan drew a carfully drafted line for what he wanted to include in the 5th edition and was thinking ahead to the 6th edition already. That's not a bad thing, of course. The result is a very clean 5th edition.

Too bad E4X ended up getting buried in the Client-Side section. I hope the 6th edition will treat it as an extension to Core Javascript instead. Hopefully, including mentioning it in the Literals section and in chapter 3, even-though it is an optional "standard extension".

The belgian group
Hooverphonic
was clearly the highlight of
this years
Mont-Soleil
Open Air Festival
! I already really liked their last album
No More Sweet Music
, but seeing them perform live was even more impressive. Unlike many groups these days, which can't match the quality of their recordings outside the studio, Hooverphonic's performance was excellent!

Hot on the heels of Helma 1.5.1 and in order to
clear the slate
for Helma/Rhino 1.6, which will bring us E4X support amongst other goodies,
Helma 1.5.2 has been released
, fixing a potentially annoying error logging issue.

Various unregistered media types have been used in an ad-hoc fashion
to label and exchange programs written in ECMAScript and JavaScript.
These include:
+-----------------------------------------------------+
| text/javascript | text/ecmascript |
| text/javascript1.0 | text/javascript1.1 |
| text/javascript1.2 | text/javascript1.3 |
| text/javascript1.4 | text/javascript1.5 |
| text/jscript | text/livescript |
| text/x-javascript | text/x-ecmascript |
| application/x-javascript | application/x-ecmascript |
| application/javascript | application/ecmascript |
+-----------------------------------------------------+
Use of the "text" top-level type for this kind of content is known to
be problematic. This document thus defines text/javascript and text/
ecmascript but marks them as "obsolete". Use of experimental and
unregistered media types, as listed in part above, is discouraged.
The media types,
* application/javascript
* application/ecmascript
which are also defined in this document, are intended for common use
and should be used instead.
This document defines equivalent processing requirements for the
types text/javascript, text/ecmascript, and application/javascript.
Use of and support for the media type application/ecmascript is
considerably less widespread than for other media types defined in
this document. Using that to its advantage, this document defines
stricter processing rules for this type to foster more interoperable
processing.

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